The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Generally, a service processor (SP) or a baseboard management controller (BMC) refers to a specialized microcontroller that manages the interface between system management software and platform hardware. The SP can be embedded on the motherboard of a computer, generally a server. For example, different types of sensors can be built into the computer system, and the SP reads these sensors to obtain parameters such as temperature, cooling fan speeds, power status, operating system (OS) status, etc. The SP monitors the sensors and can send alerts to a system administrator via the network if any of the parameters do not stay within preset limits, indicating a potential failure of the system. The administrator can also remotely communicate with the SP to take some corrective action such as resetting or power cycling the system to get a hung OS running again.
In a standard rack server system, a SP can be used for managing and monitoring the server system. However, in a blade server system, a blade enclosure (generally referred to as a chassis) encloses multiple blade servers, with each blade server having many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, while still having all the functional components to be considered a computer. In this case, each blade server may use a SP for managing and monitoring the corresponding blade server, and data transmission between the blade servers or between the SP's of the blade servers may be required.
Therefore, an unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.